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Satellites Expose 8,000 Years of Civilization
ananyo writes "By combining spy-satellite photos obtained in the 1960s with modern multispectral images and digital maps of Earth's surface, researchers have created a new method for mapping large-scale patterns of human settlement. The approach was used to map some 14,000 settlement sites spanning eight millennia in 23,000 square kilometres of northeastern Syria — part of the fertile crescent of the Middle East. Traditional archaeology has focused on the big features such as cities or palaces but the new technique uncovers networks of small settlements, revealing migration patterns and sparking renewed speculation about the importance of water to city development."
Wilkinson & Ur, the ones behind the project, have been doing this for at least 10 years. Check out the CAMEL project on the Oriental institute of the university of Chicago
How are young earthers going to explain this one?
Do we need to speculate that human settlements need water?
This sounds like it should be fairly obvious ... you need water for people, livestock, plants ...
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The Barada river area has been settled for at least 11,000, Jericho for at least 11,000, Byblos for at least 9,000.
Humans already caused climate change once. Specifically the huns with Genghis Khan burning down forests all over Asia and Europe. He not only left a trace in our DNA by having many "wifes" making a fair share of Eurasians descendents of him, he also had a measurable impact on the climate on that time.
Wicked! Some src for claims.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
Well I'll be... It sounds like the biblical fundamentalists were correct about the ago of the earth, after all.
Its going to be 8000 years before we can send someone to investigate given the current political climate :( /Cynicism
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
I once used the satellite view of Google Maps to look for old train tracks that have been torn up and gone for decades. It's actually pretty interesting. If you go out and visit spots where the tracks used to be, you can't see anything out of the ordinary. But a satellite shot clearly shows the "scars" of where the tracks used to be. Where they cut through forests, the trees are a little shorter. The soil in farm fields is colored differently. Roads bend to intersect the track at a right angle, things like that.
Here's a good example in Washtenaw county. You can see the "ghost tracks" going southwest/northeast. If you follow them northeast, you'll see that a new subdivision was built on an area of land that they used to cut through. Curiously, the developers built no houses where the tracks were. Instead, they added footpaths, gave some houses larger backyards, and left "gaps" where houses could have been built. (I'd love to know why this was done. Any developers in the audience?)
You can follow the tracks southwest as well, but eventually you get to a region where the images were taken with a different satellite at a different time of year and the loss of contrast makes the tracks impossible to follow any further.
You can't make beer without water.
Who knows... within a few thousand years we might have civilization here in North America too.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Presumably they will come to the ultimate frantic crazy conclusion that it was cavemen until 0BC then all christian with no margin for error... :0)
The purpose of existence is to make money.
We don't even learn from recent, known history and act accordingly, so why expect much from this new (mostly irrelevant) information? This is a fun project for young elites whos parents are filthy rich enough to send them to Harvard. For the rest, who are just elite enough (say top 20%) to have any leisure time to even care, there might be a website set up where you can click on an interactive map (table scraps). Yeah, cultures need water and water comes after the civilization is formed when the soil dries up. Mind blowing. Yeah, that's a lot more pertinent than hmm say information from 60 years ago that might slow our march to fascism. For some, this is information your big distraction, for others (the bottom 80%), it's American Idol. Whatever, as long as you're not thinking of the big fat ugly elephant that's sitting in the middle of the room. Must take a lot of discipline to be so blind. The type of discipline they teach at Harvard and on TV.
FTFY.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
I don't remember what show it was but there was a archelogist who was on a mission to try and map all the lost mayan cities that were burried in the jungle and by happenstance a friend of his gave him a satellite map, he noticed ligther color areas and asked his buddy who gave him the map did he manipulate the colors, he said no.
He had noticed when he discovered other Mayan ruins that the lime stone had seeped into the soil causing the area to be lightter in color.
So he used his GPS to map out the corodinates on his Satellitle map and woudln't you know he was able to find lost temples burried deep in the rain forests.
Pretty cool stuff!
And here I assumed nothing existed before I starting perceiving things...
Terry Pratchett wrote a brilliant send-up of this, one of his early books -- "Strata". Hilarious. I've been on the lookout for news of a pocket watch in a coal seam ever since.
The Antikythera mechanism comes close ;-)
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Human civilizations started in several areas on planet Earth
North Eastern Syria is one of them
The Indus River area (India) is another. Other places include the Yang Tze Jiang delta (China), Nile delta (Egypt) and even some ancient civlizations in the Americas
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
And your Bible Bogey also says he'll burn anyone he doesn't like for all of eternity (though perhaps not, if you can read koine Greek, but how many believers do?). Sorry, but the archaeology, history, text criticism, and so forth all disprove your religion. I'm not a mythicist (person who believes Jesus never existed), but I've studied long and hard and come to the conclusion that Yahweh doesn't. You're a decent person and you seem to grasp philosophical scepticism; you're just still committing very common category errors, as did I until rather recently. Let the genocidal sky wizard go; you'll feel better for it.